Hylo for #PlanetaryHealth - 3.1.0 Release Notes
Today we’re launching our second release in partnership with the Planetary Health Alliance to support their upcoming Annual Meeting and global ecosystem of the #PlanetaryHealth movement! These key features will make Hylo more engaging for group members and make life easier for group stewards. Enjoy!
New Features
Home View for Groups
We have a brand new Home view to orient existing and new group members. The Home view helps members discover what’s most alive in their community by displaying a welcome message, recent announcements, recent posts, open requests and offers, upcoming events, recently active projects, recently active members, and sub-groups.
Group stewards can customize this page by creating a welcome message specific to your group, and have the ability to show or hide each content piece for your group as desired.
Customizable Stream
The Stream of posts is the heart of every group on Hylo, and now it’s more customizable. We have added a new Compact list view in addition to the current card view. For people that have preferences on how the Stream is sorted and filtered, these settings are now remembered and reflected as you navigate across groups.
Group Network Map Visualization
It’s so much easier to understand relationships when they are mapped out! The new Network Map on the Group View appears for all groups that are networked with other groups, whether a parent group, child group, or multiples of each, and shows all of these relationships. This automatically generated network map instantly helps members understand the ecosystem of groups they are connected to.
Plus, the map is interactive, so members can press and drag to move the groups and see all the connections. Clicking a group avatar will take you to that group.
Suggested Skills
Group stewards have a new way to bring their community together: by adding suggested skills & interests relevant to the group. Stewards can add suggested skills in Group Settings, and they will appear for prospective members and new members as they enter the group. Whether requesting to join a group or accepting an invitation, the new member will see a menu of the suggested skills and can select which ones are relevant to them.
Skills and Interests appear on Member Profiles and are searchable, so it’s a great way to find new friends to connect with in your group!
Mobile Upgrades
For the iOS and Android versions of Hylo, we’re releasing a number of usability improvements to Profiles, the Post Editor, Projects, and Group Settings.
For Power Users
PHA has 220+ member organizations around the world, so their stewardship team needs advanced features to support the missions of these networked groups. For anyone else leading an ecosystem of groups, we hope you’ll find these features quite useful as well.
Group to Group Join Questions
In the recent #HolonicArchitecture release, we added the capacity for groups to join other groups, paving the way for nested group relationships that reflect how groups actually collaborate. Group stewards can go to Settings to join or request to join their group to other groups, either as a parent or a child.
We’ve now added functionality here so group leaders can specify questions to be answered by another group requesting to join it. The answers for these incoming requests appear in the Related Groups tab of Group Settings.
Prerequisite Groups
Sometimes it’s important for a prospective group member to join a parent group (like an organization’s main group hub) before joining a child group (like a working group or regional subgroup). For these cases, we’ve given group stewards the ability to set a “Prerequisite Group” that must be joined first.
When a prospective member attempts to join a group with a prerequisite, a modal will pop up to let them know and invite them to join the required group.
Export
We envision a world where groups and individuals have sovereignty over their own data and can easily move between platforms, and we’re taking action on this goal through our participation in the Collaborative Technology Alliance.
We’re taking the first step towards that goal by offering Export capabilities to group stewards. There’s a new Export Data tab in Group Settings where you can export your group’s member directory as a CSV. In order to also respect individual members’ sovereignty over their information, the export includes only what’s already available on members’ profiles, plus their answers to your group’s Join Questions if you have them. The export won’t include members’ email address for their Hylo account, Hylo usage data, or anything else they haven’t explicitly shared.
Help make Hylo awesome!
You can help improve Hylo by testing out the new features and letting us know how it goes!
Please reach out — questions, comments, bug reports are all welcome — through the Feedback and Support tab in Hylo. We’re a small team but we’re listening, and we’ll do our best to resolve any issues promptly.
Thanks for supporting open-source software!
